Drawing errors
Drawing is an exercise of putting yourself between the control and the deliberate error, between the sketch for a later project (the drawing as mental project) and the space of experimentation where tools meet surface. Halfway through the process of updating the 2011 version of her portfolio, Daniela Seixas receives an error message from the software she was using - "a drawing error occurred". Between the surprise and the stimulus that this message brings to her research as an artist, she decides to save the print screen of her computer just as it was. After some time, while again working on this arduous task of organizing her own production in digital files, another program communicates and tells her "out of memory". Another print screen is carried out and now the errors of computing have become a diptych.
When a computer tells us that there was a drawing error with regard to the organization of a file, we could say that this is an absolutely accurate notification - drawing and error go hand in hand and, perhaps, may be considered synonymous. Given the interest of the artist in the language of drawing since her undergraduate studies in Visual Arts at UERJ, machine notifications seem more than appropriate.
Daniela opts in fact for a triptych, as she inserts another element in this series of works, About the Blank - about: blank - a blank page that often greets the user in internet browsers, and which coincidentally was the first computer generated message that she recorded with her own hands. In this sense, we have the blank sheet, the drawing error, and the shortage of memory occupying the exhibition space in a cross-shaped fashion.
By contextualizing where these errors take place, in other words, by circumscribing them within the four virtual sides of that which she tried to alter while attempting to better organize her own artistic business card - her portfolio - the word "error" seems even more potent due to the ever fallacious character inherent to any ordering of pages aiming to be a sample of the research of an artist. Every PDF is an error; every selection of images aiming at expediently aligning a professional of the visual arts with a specific trajectory is insufficient curation - how to distinguish the works that deserve to be there (the "hits") from those which do not dialogue with the whole, or those which are seen as deviations from that trajectory?
In Of color (recording with the heart), the artist seems to touch upon this issue when sharing with the public her attempts to print the pages of her Master's dissertation. Due to a failure in the encounter between the inks, the words vanish and the letters turn into patches of color. From this perspective, drawing is placed as a close relative of painting and as a counterpoint to the accurate recording, in black, of precise sentences.
From this clash between the individual and the page, one of the main elements of the exhibit comes forth, the action duel/duet. The idea of a wrong drawing is also something which permeates our childhood and classroom experiences, where often those who draw realistically are regarded as talented. Therefore, by means of a magic mirror, a common toy in our childhoods, permitting one to loyally copy an image, artist and curator will stand face-to-face at the center of the gallery and will also try to error while drawing.
It is a partnership that goes beyond the professional performance in the visual arts system - the same way that the life of an artistic work is beyond the walls of the white cube and the sheets of a PDF. More than friends, they are brothers, willingly so, for the past ten years - or, as the Chinese philosopher Mencius would better put it, "Friendship is one mind in two bodies". Drawings from childhood, adolescence texts, drafts from the master's degree, publications, works from under graduation, more recent experimentations...many objects which are the result of a drawing mindset will be copied by each other in this relationship, right in front of the public.
That which is of my authorship will be shared and appropriated by Daniela and vice-versa, always on the same paper base. More than an exhibition about the many possibilities that drawing can bring to contemporary production - be it literally, digitally, or in the field of performance - this event is configured as a celebration of the exchange of complicity between two friends.
The only certainty with regard to this ritual of mirrored drawing is the error; the only hope I have is that our friendship will continue on the difficult path of eternal love.